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Bruce Omori, owner of Extreme Exposures Fine Art Gallery in Hilo, received the Windland Smith Rice International Award for his lava photo titled “Volcanic Vortices,” which will be displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s annual exhibition in June. His winning photograph was selected from almost 20,000 submissions from photographers in 46 countries.

“On an early morning shoot at the Waikupanaha ocean entry, lava from the Kilauea volcano poured into the sea. This created a huge escape of steam, and as it rose, multiple vortices began spinning off of the huge plume,” Omori described in his photo submission description. “A vortex or two is a pretty rare sight—but when one after another kept forming, my fumbling with the lenses turned into a panicked rush to switch my telephoto to wide angle lens to capture this awesome scene of seven vortices in a row.” Thanks to Muriel Lighter

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Click on the link to earth_art-ebook to download a pdf file of an amazing collection of earth views from 16 NASA satellites

Some of the instruments aboard the satellites collect data in different ranges of wavelengths of light. These “spectral bands” break up all the visible and invisible light into chunks: the reds, the blues, the greens and even infrared, a wavelength of light that humans can’t see.

When researchers piece the image data back together, they can be selective about which “bands” of light are displayed in the final image. “The selection depends on the intent of the analysis,” Friedl wrote in an email. “An analysis of vegetation would probably select the red, green and infrared bands — vegetation is ‘bright’ in those bands and the analyst could differentiate between the types or health of vegetation.”

Phytoplankton Bloom, Baltic Sea, 2005 Massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that form the first link in nearly all ocean food chains. Blooms of phytoplankton, occur when deep currents bring nutrients up to sunlit surface waters.

Friedl says analysts generally don’t go out of their way to make images look surreal, but this kind of spectral analysis can be used to great effect. “There are whole books written on what band combinations to use to bring out certain features,” he told me. Like rocks: When studying the retreat of the glaciers of the Himalayas, Friedl says, you can train software to recognize the light signature of exposed rock. And instead of directly measuring the glaciers themselves, you can see where new rock is getting exposed year over year.

National Geographic is currently holding its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30. For the past nine weeks, the society has been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to vote for them as well. National Geographic was kind enough to let Alan Taylor choose among its entries from 2011 for display here on In Focus. Gathered below are 45 images from the three categories of People, Places, and Nature, with captions written by the individual photographers

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LIFE photo archive hosted by GoogleClick on the link above to search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

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Kevel Lindsay passes on these on-line photos from the US Library of Congress collection, made in the USVI in late 1941 by the Farm Service Administration, which was one of the Franklin Roosevelt programs to bring the country out of the Depression . . .

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scanR scanR is a free service that lets you use your mobile camera phone or digital camera to clean photos of whiteboards, documents and business cards, extract the printed information, and get a digital file in your email, contact manager, or fax.

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Pulitzer Photo The windows of the 15-story Winecoff Hotel were backlit by orange flames. Guests–jumping out of panic or falling from makeshift ropes of bedsheets as they tried to escape the terrible smoke–were landing and dying on Peachtree Street. Amid the pandemonium and a cacophony of sirens, Hardy went to work. He took a shot that spanned the front of the building and the faces of the doomed in the windows–the mutely pleading, hopeless faces. When he was down to his final flashbulb–one had exploded in the cold night air–Hardy decided to try for a picture of a falling or jumping guest. When his viewfinder found a dark-haired woman falling midair at the third floor, her skirt billowing, he snapped the shutter open for 1/400th of a second.

With his photography completed, Hardy heard a fireman and policeman at a drugstore across the street discussing calling the store owner so they could obtain medical supplies. He told them to break the door open. When they said they wouldn’t he kicked it open himself. He was quickly arrested.

As the Red Cross moved into the store to set up a first-aid station and make sandwiches and coffee for the firemen, Hardy was led off to jail. Upon being released on his own recognizance, he headed for the darkroom at the Tech research search lab. He developed his film and struck out for the Associated Press office downtown. The AP offered him $150 for exclusive rights to his pictures. He said he wanted $300–and got it. His final photograph–the one of the jumping woman–would be reprinted around the world the following day, and be on magazine covers for weeks. The fire had killed 119 people and drawn international coverage as the worst hotel fire in the history of the world. A few months later, Hardy became the first amateur photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize. More Pictures

The ad for Sorouh Real Estate measures more than 20,000 square metres and has been declared by a Guinness World Record adjudicator as a new “world record for banner size”.

The ad, which is next to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, aims to raise awareness of the Abu Dhabi-based Sorouh. It will show a million faces from around the world as part of a charity campaign and will donate 50p ($1) to United Arab Emirates Red Crescent, for every picture uploaded.

Further Ad-Air sites are due to roll out in London Heathrow airport, Madrid, Geneva, Tokyo, Paris and Bangkok.

Ad-Air Middle East managing director Stephen Jones says the site offers “an unprecedented marketing opportunity” for any brand wishing to put its stamp on Dubai.

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These pics were taken in the Suntree area of Florida ~Viera~ south of Cocoa & Titusville.

A Sand Hill Crane couple recently had an exciting addition to their family. When they built their nest near the water’s edge it immediately drew attention of passers by. Soon there were two eggs sitting on top of the nest and the mother on top of them.

The really curious passed by the site every morning and would stop their cars to get out and see if there were any new cranes yet. Many brought cameras of all shapes and sizes and would stand near the water for long periods of time hoping to catch a photo of the hatching.

Robert Grover, a dentist, didn’t actually catch the birth but, he sure did capture some fabulous shots of the Momma, Papa and baby (the second egg never hatched). Then he put together a slide show with music. Click on the Robert Grover Photography link. Thanks to Ken Beall for passing this on.

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This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. This image if from 106,000 aluminum cans, the quantity discarded in the US every 30 seconds!

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ESO 40/07 – Galaxy ‘Hunting’ Made Easy Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered in a single pass about a dozen otherwise invisible galaxies halfway across the Universe. The discovery, based on a technique that exploits a first-class instrument, represents a major breakthrough in the field of galaxy ‘hunting’.

There are estimated to be hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, but only about a dozen that sit in front of quasars have been detected at such a distance from Earth. The latest finds have doubled this tally.

Light from the newly found galaxies comes from the time the universe was about 6 billion years old, less than half its current age. By studying the light, the researchers have determined they are starburst galaxies that form lots of new stars — the equivalent of 20 suns a year.

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Visible Earth: The Blue Marble This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. Click on the image for more and click forMore details and views.

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What the World Eats | Photo Essays | TIME What’s on family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book “Hungry Planet”. Slide Show with what looks like a week’s worth of groceries spread out in the kitchen of the family in each of the 15 pictures.

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This 3 minute video morphs together the 500 year progression of Western Female portraits while Segovia plays Bach. Thanks to Chad Brisbane – he’s so cultured. They should have elected him NY State Senator.

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Virgin Islands, Virgin Islands Newspaper,
Daily News photographer Sean McCoy recently shot a series of images, taken from a West End beach on St. Croix as the sun was setting, and chanced to catch the phenomenon – a momentary flash of green that occurs just as the sun slips below the horizon.

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Wilk4: Breaking the Sound Barrier Here are some fascinating (for some people anyway) photos and a video of interesting condensation clouds that form around jets as they fly at or near the speed of sound, (often called “going through the sound barrier” or “accelerating past the speed of sound”). Under the right conditions, they sometimes cause a vapor cone effect.

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U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service —
The photographs of this deer-eating alligator were taken from the air by Terri Jenkins, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service District Fire Management Officer. She was preparing to ignite a prescribed fire at Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, about 40 miles south of Savannah, Georgia, on March 4, 2004. (Thanks to Bob Bopp for Snopes.com on this one that has circulated around the net).